Payback: Grand Theft Auto (GTA) clone for iPhone

Dozens of vehicles and 11 cities to explore. The player starts off each city on-foot and must get to a payphone to receive mission details. At first, the player’s only weapons are his fists, but crates scattered about the cities contain shotguns, grenades and other weapons that aid significantly in wreaking various flavors of havoc upon the cities’ inhabitants.

Each level requires a certain number of accumulated points to complete. Points are gained by completing mission milestones, running down civilians, and generally causing mayhem. The more mayhem the player causes, the more of a target he / she becomes to local law enforcement. A particular challenge of the game is the short timeframe given to complete certain missions.

The game features accelerometer control for left / right movement and touchscreen control for forward / backward movement as well as fire and enter / exit vehicle controls.

Payback offers three modes of play: Story, Rampage and Challenge:

– Story mode places the player in the role of a criminal seeking to amass as much money as possible in moving from city to city.
– Challenge mode offers all of the cities of Story mode plus a variety of smaller arenas–more of a pick-up game scenario.
– Rampage mode has no requisite score to move from level to level, it’s just about getting the most points possible.

The original version was released for the Amiga in 2001 to rave reviews and was voted Game of Year in multiple polls. Mac, Intent and GBA versions followed, the GBA version being nominated in both IGN and GameSpot’s “Best of E3 2004″ awards.

In 2006, the game received a major overhaul for the powerful GP2X handheld – GamesTM awarded it 91%, describing it as “the best GTA clone you’ve never heard of”. The lighting was made fully HDR (the paths of trillions of photons were calculated to produce some of the best looking lighting ever seen in a portable game), the menu system was completely redone, a complete vocal soundtrack was added and many other significant improvements were made.

The iPhone/iPod Touch version builds on the strong foundations laid down by the GP2X version by adding an automatic save system, reengineered controls, HUD refinements and further gameplay improvements.